Ah, those were the days...

If you don't read The Shoestring, the occasional small magazine newsletter from Magazines Canada, you miss out on Coordinator Claire Pfeiffer's nice, snappy style (and her penchant for doggerel verse). The most recent issue has a very interesting item that is a recollection by illustrator Bernie Lyon of one of Canada's better-known titles, Vancouver magazine, when it was struggling. Such fragments of memory are often lost over time and it's good when they are captured.

To augment: when Mac Parry was Editor at Vancouver, he was famous for talent spotting. One of his finds was Douglas Coupland, then as unfamous as could be. Mac loved the incongruous -- such things as Coupland's stunt of bottling Vancouver tap water (in his mother's laundry tub) and marketing the result with an elaborate label on the bottle saying "Bottled at the Source".

Vancouver was sold by Ron Stern to Comac Communications Limited, then sold on a few years later to Telemedia, which was absorbed by Transcon, which now owns it. (See previous item). But it's not surprising that most everybody is nostalgic about the wilder, woolier days. Hard to find anything funky about $4 billion companies.